Fix The Brand Paradox with ART

This week’s 2¢: How do you reach future buyers without saying the B-word?

Everyone in B2B marketing agrees we need to reach future buyers, the majority of whom are not in market today, whether it’s the 95-5 rule from LinkedIn or the latest research from 6Sense that says this should be the 60-34-6 rule, we agree we need to reach into the “dark funnel”.

But nobody wants to call the thing that reaches them brand.

In B2B it’s associated with a subjective, fluffy visual identity, obscure Jaguar car launches, agency types and long-term returns when everyone wants short-term dashboard gratification. A world away from revenue, and, for the last decade, has been displaced by the perceived instant hit of performance marketing.

And yet, the 95-5 rule (or pick your research poison for proof that we need to reach the buyer before they are in market) shows we need it more than ever, you can’t retarget people you don’t know, you can’t performance market your way to attention, stimulate demand that doesn’t exist or scale a business on focusing on the same 5% where all the competition are focused.

What we need is familiarity in the buying group, preference when it’s time to buy, something that will inspire a sponsor to pick up your ball and run with it, to be top of mind when a category entry point opens - those triggers that lead a latent buyer to recognise a need and explore solutions.

• If your SDR email lands cold because the buyer has never heard of you; that’s a brand problem.
• If your category narrative is so vague your ICP can’t repeat it in a meeting; that’s a brand problem.
• If your product looks identical to five others on G2; that’s a brand problem.

I’ve heard one strategy, which is not to say the word “brand”, and think of a way to describe a system that makes future buyers more likely to choose us when they do enter the market as something else.

I’ve heard this from serious commentators, podcasts, and various CMOs, and so I can’t really call BS on it, but whatever you call it, we need to do some internal marketing of the benefits we get from lets-not-call-it-brand and have a strategy that delivers its benefits:

• Message clarity: Your story, category, and differentiation
• Emotional trust: People believe you’re credible and safe
• Mental availability: They remember you exist
• Consistency across touchpoints: From SDR decks to website copy
• Distinctiveness: So you don’t blur into the sludge of B2B sameness

Each of these has a commercial benefit, either greasing the wheels of a buyer's decision, increasing pipeline and sales velocity, or creating efficiency when everyone is on the same page.

These are things we need to do.

I am not averse to dropping the B word amongst the non-believers, but I, as you will know if you read this regularly, frame this as ART, creating Awareness, Revenue and Trust, words that you can tie to things the C-Suite, and yes, even the CFO, cares about.

Creating ART requires the same activity you’d usually label as brand work, blended with a big dose of content marketing:

• Understand and align with company commercial goals
• Research the ICP, category, personas and buyer needs
• Develop a story, corporate point of view and leadership/founder positions
• Define your tone of voice, visual identity and company message
• Refine your product positioning to make features/functions relevant
• Executing this in the market through campaigns
• etc..

In B2B, whatever you call the process, the metrics or the internal program to create it, the work doesn’t change if we want to reach the future 95% (or whatever the percentage of latent buyers you have in your category), we need to raise their awareness of us, ensure that they trust we can solve the problem and be positioned easily to buy.

There is a word for that - brand.